


Locker Room Talk

by JustLookFrightenedAndScuttle



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: 2016 election - Freeform, Gen, Politics, background jack zimmermann/eric bittle - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 03:12:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8354650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustLookFrightenedAndScuttle/pseuds/JustLookFrightenedAndScuttle
Summary: Bitty and Coach have a conversation about the second presidential debate





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a small ficlet that's been rattling around my head so I decided to get it out. It has to do with the 2016 presidential election, and if you're a fan of Donald Trump, you probably won't like it.  
> This universe belongs to Ngozi, and I'm grateful every day that she shares it with us.  
> Not beta'd, so please tell me about any problems.

When Bitty let himself into the Haus, he heard the shouting from the living room.

“You go, Anderson Cooper!”

Nursey was actually cheering the CNN anchor. The debate must have started.

Bitty dropped his bag at the foot of the stairs, briefly considering going to his room and avoiding the debate entirely. He was sick of it, and he’d planned to spend the weekend cocooned with Jack without even listening to the news, but then that tape dropped while he was on the bus to Providence. Suddenly it was all anyone could talk about.

Bitty, for his part, was sickened by it. Maybe he wasn’t a girl, but he could relate to the fear of having someone bigger and stronger lay hands on him, of being seen as vulnerable because of who he was. How much worse was it for girls? he wondered. He heard things when he was active on the figure skating circuits, from girls who were 14, 13, even 12. 

Bitty, frankly, did not want to hear any more. But he felt a responsibility. As an American citizen and a voter -- he had already applied for an absentee ballot for Georgia -- and as a student studying American culture. It couldn’t all be apple pie.

So he headed into the living room. Dex and Nursey were on the couch, with Chowder on the floor, his laptop open.

Tango was in the beanbag chair, and even Whiskey was there, sitting in the chair on the corner.

"Hey, Bitty!" Nursey said. "You should have heard Anderson Cooper just call him out, tell him that what he talked about was sexual assault. 'That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?' Sick burn." 

Nursey turned back to the TV. 

“Oh, no, you didn’t!” Nursey said, as Donald Trump’s face filled the screen, saying something about ISIS, and then saying, “It’s just locker room talk!”

“He said it again,” Tango said. “Do you think he thinks that true?”

“I don’t know, bro,” Nursey said. “But as an athlete, as a New Yorker, as an American, as someone perceived to be of the male gender, I’m embarrassed. Even at Andover -- and if you want to talk privilege and entitlement, dude, believe me, I’ve seen it -- no one would have talked about treating women like that. If anything, they talked about how much girls wanted them -- lied about it, more like -- but anyway, they didn’t talk about assaulting them.”

Dex, who was almost as red as Donald Trump on the screen, managed to snicker and say, “Nursey, chill.”

“Oh, come on, Dex, even you said he was a disgrace,” Nursey said.

“He is,” Dex said. “He’s an embarrassment. He’s disgusting, and I wouldn’t want any of my sisters to ever be alone with him. But yelling at the TV isn’t going to change that.”

Bitty saw the screen had changed to a shot of Hillary Clinton, resplendent in blue tonight, but Donald Trump was still in the frame, looming behind her like the boogeyman of his childhood nightmares. He decided watching this wasn’t going to change anything, and he said, “G’night, guys. I’m beat.”

His phone rang as he made his way up the stairs, and the caller ID said “Mama-home.”

He answered as he shouldered his door open, wondering what she wanted, since they had talked on Skype earlier today.

“Mama? Everything OK?”

“No, it’s me, Junior,” his father’s voice said.

“Coach? Is Mama all right?” Bitty’s worry bled into his voice. Coach almost never called; he talked to Bitty when Mama handed the phone to him.

“Yes, Junior, she’s fine,” Coach said. “It’s just, I was watching the debate …”

Lord, where was he going to go with this? Coach was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, someone who had probably never voted for a Democrat in his life, and Bitty had been so careful not to bring up politics on his visit home this summer because he didn’t want to learn something he would really rather not know about his father.

“What he said about locker room talk, son,” his father said. “You’re an athlete. You’re a captain. You don’t tolerate that kind of talk there, do you? Because if you do, maybe I should have made myself more clear when you were coming up.”

Bitty almost laughed at that. He’d come out to his parents over the summer; who did his father think he was talking to?

“Uh, Coach, talking about women -- that’s not really something I do,” he said.

“But not everybody on your team is gay or queer or whatever they call themselves, and it’s up to you to set the tone,” Coach said. “It’s important for them to know that what that man is saying is totally unacceptable.”

That man? Bitty thought.

What he said was, “The tone was set long before me, Coach. Sh-- uh, Mr. Crappy, would come back personally from Cambridge and have our hides if anyone behaved like that.”

“Good, that’s good,” Coach said. “I’m going to have a talk with my team at practice tomorrow to remind them of that. I know the boys can be rough-and-tumble sometimes, but I don’t want to hear about them thinking they’re better than anyone, or have the right to do anything like that.”

“You do that, Coach,” Bitty said, not able to keep a touch of bitterness out of his voice. Where was that talk when he was in high school?

“OK,” his father said. “Is there more to that?”

Bitty breathed in, then out. Not the time, he thought, at least not the time he wanted to talk about it.

“No, Coach,” he said. “You talk to them. Maybe it’ll do some good.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/justlookfrightened)!


End file.
